


better to live or to die (have mercy)

by winterleaving



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, POV Outsider, POV Second Person, some poor bastard's about to get destroyed, the strawhats are kind of terrifying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27616007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterleaving/pseuds/winterleaving
Summary: Strawhat had mercy, but there is an important distinction that must be made. On the seas, mercy cannot be equated with kindness. Mercy - it means strength.(Luffy doesn't kill).
Comments: 15
Kudos: 86





	better to live or to die (have mercy)

There was something terrible in his gentleness, in his refusal to land the fatal blow.

___________________

Monkey D. Luffy left behind a trail of enemies whenever he went - not because he was strong, but because he was merciful the way gold plated rulers were not. Once, the path of the king was a bloody one, paved with corpses. Gol D. Roger ruled the era with an iron first, and died like a star exploding, glorious red on the highest stage in the world - the beginning. Monkey D. Luffy’s era had yet to begin. Roger was a stagelight brighter than the sun - born to shine, but Strawhat was a predator leaving its home for the first time in search of bigger prey. Born to _devour._

The road he paves is slick with discarded bodies, all simmering in humiliation, seething in a rage only blood would quench, and watching the back of one small man with all the focus of hawks hunting prey - preparing to dive in for the kill the minute he slipped. But Strawhat was a strong man - made of something harder than diamond - and you knew, after the first and only clash against him and his crew, that he would not waver unless he was dead. And you knew, in your bones, that you would see his journey to the end - whether you liked it or not. 

Strawhat had mercy, but there is an important distinction that must be made. On the seas, mercy cannot be equated with kindness. Mercy - it means strength. 

___________________

You remember it; roaring with laughter in a bar filled with drunkards, toasting and partying and yelling gleefully long after the sun had set. The lights were unsteady, singing a cadence to you while you stumbled in uneven circles. Alcohol sloshed around and flowed like water, then. A bunch of ragtag pirates celebrating - drinking to living another day on the ocean that swallowed small men whole.

Someone’s grabbing at the newspaper - checking for new threats? Gossip? 

_Ahahahaha! Look here at this one!_ Some completely wasted bastard is trying (and failing miserably) to climb onto a table. His head hits the light no less than three times.

_He don’t even kill! All his enemies still alive!_

_What kind’a pirate doesn’t even kill? Leaving all his enemies alive, that fool._

_Hic...who the hell’r’ya talkin about? Ah, it don’t matter. You! Get me a refill! Hahahaha!_

Shit, you think.

Some pirate out there leaving his foes alive? That poor son of a whore. He isn’t going to last long like that, but it’s not your problem. Ain’t no room for compassion on the watery graveyard of the Grand Line. You get a face full of crinkled paper as it makes its round across the tavern.

Grumbling, you take it, and through bleary eyes you can make out the smiling face of a boy; MONKEY D. LUFFY stamped underneath in bold. WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE. This is him, then? An idiot, and a young one too, to boot. Don’t seem like much.

Probably another bright eyed youth looking to die.

_Hey, who shoved this into me? I ain’t here to read, y’know? I’m ‘ere to drink!_

___________________

Ah, the sun sure is hot.

The back of your neck is drenched with sweat. Overhead, there are gulls circling the ship, and all the while the heat bears down on you incessantly. You’ve long since left the port, and it’ll be a good week or so before the next island makes itself known. For some, this means becoming restless, cramped and crowded in the curved wood and chained by their own energy, but you’ve been a pirate for long enough that the sea is more home to you than any soil could ever be. Still, the crew is a mismatched, motley group of people brought together by circumstance, and even you can feel an itch start under your skin. A pirate's life is hardly peaceful for long. 

Sure enough, something in the wind changes.

(Or maybe it doesn’t.)

But you’ve got instincts finely sharpened; your body the blade and the sea your whetstone. You feel a fight coming, and you’re so rarely wrong these days. 

The waves get stronger, the gulls screech higher. There’s a crackle of something electric in the air - a prelude to a fight, or a storm, or maybe both. In the distance, a vaguely obnoxious Jolly Roger begins to make itself known. It looks like a small ship, nothing worth noting, but it’s undoubtedly heading on a collision course with you, and with no apparent plans of turning away - and the thrill begins to heat up your veins.

Good.

Your blade would dull if it didn’t meet battle every now and then, and with the scent of incoming blood is high in the air, your crew starts to stir. Metal on metal sings in anticipation and the low rumble of your pounding heartbeat starts to drum - pirates don’t wait for the fight to come to them. They go to the fight. 

“Change our course! We’re about to loot some unlucky bastards today, boys!”

 _Hell yeah!_ A cheer rises up from behind you. Your neck cracks.

“Let’s drink real hard at the next island, eh?”

A creeping grin starts to take shape. _It’s time,_ you think. A pirate's life needs blood in it.

Preparations to board the approaching ship are well underway, (is that a caravel? On the _Grand Line?_ ) but quickly things start to go wrong, as they are wont to do. A whistling projectile is slicing through the space between the two vessels, cutting through it and carving a path straight to your ship. Something is rocketing towards your crew, and at first you assume it’s a cannonball like any sensible man, but after squinting your eyes through the spyglass, you realize in disbelief that it seems to be...a person? A loudly hollering, scrawny, and wild eyed person, to be exact. Before you have a chance to fully process any of this, there’s no more time for thought - he’s crashing into your deck, hurtling through the air like a bullet and landing with all the grace of a meteor crashing. 

“Woohoo! A clean landing! (Uh, no, it was definitely not.) _Shishishishi!_ Who’s first?” The brat, and it's definitely a brat, turns his head at frankly, an alarming angle, and grins too wide and with too many teeth to be anything but a threat. He cracks his knuckles and seems fully prepared to take on the lot of you on his own. At this point, the sheer absurdity of the situation has your crew frozen in shock.

The fuck? Well, you raise your sword arm. It’s the Grand Line, you’ve seen stranger. 

___________________

So, you may have made a little mistake. A slight miscalculation. An error in your judgment. And you paid with pain and bone snapped through skin. With the salt of blood in your mouth.

You met the enemy head on alright, but it was less battle and more bloody one sided massacre. You’ll be lucky to get out of it alive. _Tch._ Serves you right for underestimating them just because they got a small silly looking ship, doesn't it. Someone screams. It sounds like the navigator getting tossed overboard. Red seeps into the deck, rotting the wood. A gale shatters the hull of your ship. It came from...a sword? Okay? Okay. Part of being a pirate is prioritizing. Gales take secondary importance to your general livelihood. Breathe. See if your vitals are still intact.

Sometime about halfway through the fight, the haze of battle slowly recedes from your mind, opening up space for ill-timed panic to surge forward. Or maybe towards the tail end of it, even, given how fast you and your crew have been pushed back. Regardless, you figure out why the pirates you’ve been fighting have been making you so uneasy. It goes beyond the overwhelming brute strength - there’s a pressure in the air you can’t explain, and your hands are starting to tremble with exhaustion as sweat loosens your grip, compromising your vision. Salt is bitter in your eyes, but you can’t spare the time to rub it out. The captain is the brat who crash landed, of all things, and is wearing a ratty old straw hat and happens to be the spitting image of the crinkled wanted poster you mocked in a bar a lifetime ago. Surrounded by booze and music, you were halfway asleep from the alcohol, on the verge of blacking out. Of course you wouldn’t have made the connection - you were drunk out of your mind, warmed blooded and filled to brim with cheap rum. And the connection was made far too late anyways to mean anything, anyways. Knowing the identity of your attacker doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t help your bloody and injured men. It doesn’t help you, doesn’t shift your bones back in place, doesn’t unmake your wounds. 

___________________

Well, an embarrassingly short fight (beatdown) later, and a nasty concussion too, you’re crippled on the ground gasping for breath, floundering about and twitching on the deck. The Strawhats have long since left, their attention moving on to more interesting things than your crew (big fish have no time for small fry, you think bitterly). The sky seems close and so far away at the same time and everything seems to be collapsing, or maybe that’s just your ribs giving out. The world is spinning and everything tastes like metal; dizzy with blood loss and a shattered crew, and you’ve never been more awake in your life.

You can’t feel your right shoulder. It’s probably a bad sign. Also, you’ve got an ass-full of splinters from being thrown unceremoniously back into your _own damn_ ship, but lying in the debris, you can't find the energy to care. _Also,_ some green haired bastard shattered your sword. What the fuck is up with that? Who just shatters a sword? Those shits are expensive, dammit.

Deep breaths. In, out. 

Exhale and clear your head. You’re still alive. You’re still breathing. Feel your heartbeat thundering against your ribs and catch a glimpse of the sea shining around you. Touch the remains of your ship. Ground yourself. One, two, _three-_

_CRACK!_

_Fuck_ oh shit that hurts oh _seas_ your right side is exploding in fire and if you weren’t seeing stars before, you’re definitely seeing them now. Fuck, again. Your whole body is trembling with exertion, tension coiled tight around you and you feel like a rubber band about to snap. There’s some feeling back in your arm (its pain, the feeling is pain), but at _what cost_ , and this is why a medic is a top three most important crewmate to have, and you feel like you just stared down a terrible, wrathful god. A pair of eyes boring holes into you, two blackholes eating the light - sucking it in, suffocating you; and there’s no way that shitty brat was a human. What a monster. 

Except - 

No, that’s not right. You're only deluding yourself like this, hiding your weakness and terror behind big words. 

Because the truth is, that there are no gods on the seas. Here on the blues, there are only pirates with all the force of a legend in the making behind them. Bright, terrifying potential yet to be realized, leaving people like you in the dust. The fucking Strawhat carries with him all the weight of his dream (his conviction, his truth) wherever he goes, draping a cloak around his shoulders or sharpening to a deadly knife point on his knuckles. That boy was a burning, destructive supernova, and so, _so_ explosively human. 

It’s what makes him all the more terrifying, in the end.

_What kind’a pirate doesn’t even kill? Leaving all his enemies alive, that fool._

Eat your words, you stupid bastard. Choke on them and die.

Immovable force versus unstoppable object - except you’re just a regular pirate, a hardened veteran but not a monster with anything special behind you. Just someone who craves the sea, craves the thrill of violence and excitement. The Monkey brat is different; you can tell after a single, short confrontation. He’s everything larger than life crammed into the shape of a boy - all the sparks flying and dreams crashing and worlds colliding. It doesn’t make him seem human at all, but that boy seemed to breathe in every punch thrown, seemed to _thrive_ in battle the way only a human could. The way only someone so viscerally aware of death, could.

Didn’t even come up to your shoulder, but he carried himself with all the confidence of a king; with all the confidence of a man who would become a legend. You're old enough to remember Roger, remember the way he stood against the world, how his shoulders seemed endlessly broad and his strength endlessly unwavering. The world watched, then, and you have a feeling that the world will be watching now, too. Strawhat demands nothing less than the full attention of the seas, and it will be given - the world does so love its legends.

___________________

“My name is Monkey D. Luffy! Remember it well - I am the man who will become the King of Pirates!”

___________________

The blood drying on your face is starting to crack. In the face of a will strong enough to split the air like that, you feel like soggy wet paper. Thin. Insignificant. So easily torn, so easily ripped to pieces. Drifting on the waves threatening to sink you, it feels as though you might be swallowed whole.

By what, you don’t know.

The sun is hot today, with a scant few clouds in sight to offer relief. Slowly, painfully, you lift your arm up to shade your eyes. Only the wind will hear you laughing like a madman, now. Only the wind, and the sea - but it’ll sink the sound, so you don’t have to worry about it.

The Grand Line swallows small men whole, and you feel very small indeed.

_Damn. He didn’t even kill you._

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed!


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